


and behold the fairy dust

by mickleborger



Series: no sun in the shadow [2]
Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: Body Horror, Dissociation, Drug Use, Forgotten Sanctum, Forgotten Sanctum spoilers, Other, POV First Person, terrible haunted places are people too, the degree of Done we were by the end of this dlc i swear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-14 10:45:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19271662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mickleborger/pseuds/mickleborger
Summary: what do we say to the god of mindfuckery(innuendos, apparently, but that's not the subject of the fic)





	and behold the fairy dust

**Author's Note:**

> (Cellar Darling, "Starcrusher")

i.

I still feel the blood of a god like hoarfrost on my blade, cleaned though it had been since we left the Floe -- spitting mad, knowing more clearly than even after the Noonfrost why my parents left the Wend and hauled themselves and me to the other side of the known world.  I still hear Rymrgand chuckling in his vicious bovine way across the waters as the archmages discuss the situation here, as screams and gurgles and other, vaguer noises permeate the chamber. I still hear, just on the edge of hearing, a walking pile of corpses telling me with deadpan glee that it is in its nature to be a jerk. 

 _Jerky_ , supplies my brain unhelpfully, the fleshy walls of another grave shifting around us.  _The Beast_ , shrieks another voice half-remembered.  What Beast? It is our second springtime in the archipelago and the thaws are coming even for the Vytmádh.

 _The Beast_ , echoes the crumbling of wall as tentacles bring it down and throw it into the gooey abyss.  I hear laughter like the thousand voices of a thousand races, a high resonant giggle in the fog.  Fassina and Aloth are tense at either side of me, and Pallegina is near glowing.  We have spent too much time in the cold and damp.

 _The Beast_ , one final time, as if even a fraction of a god is not exponentially worse than any beast.  This is not the scream of a cean gŵla we hear echoing up from the darkness.  This is not even the scream of a thousand cean gŵlas.

ii.

I’m not going to say that a lot of us used sponge on the force, because we were far enough into the continent that the import of spire was prohibitive if you didn’t know the right people.  And I’m not going to say that a lot of us used _something_ on the force, because that life is behind me.

I’m not even going to say that this night has gone on too long, because we have had sleepless nights before.

But, shit.  Dawn has a habit of letting you know you fucked up.

iii.

 _New turn of the wheel_ , chitters a memory I can't put a face to, from one amnesiac episode to another.  A creature hiding beneath a moonlit pool cradles something to their chest and hisses about their brood, about their hopes for it.  How many of them have made choices like this, to haunt the nest generations hence?  Do they know?  The contract shakes in my hand and I think of my terrible nightmare basement that Edér, still as a stalking cat behind me, carried me out from more times than I can really buy him drinks for at this point.

I swear some of the watery shrieking from down below changes in pitch as something with my voice insists that Wael didn't sign this contract.  Wael has never signed anything in their unliving life.  I doubt any of the creatures that went into Wael were ever in the habit of signing anything.  Where are their ashes, I wonder?

Dust scuffs under our boots as a little glittery spider skitters toward us and onto my pack without hesitation.  Edér valiantly refrains from throwing himself after her as she spins herself like a many-legged brooch into my hair fine and white as spider-silk and I think, dimly, that this is doing nothing to unfuck my braid.  My hands look blue and spindly in this light.

iv.

At least Woedica had the decency to leave her temple full of ash and not _this_.  I can't stop shaking my hand into empty space, even though it's been wiped clean and magically scoured.  I look at the constructs and feel the layer of slime on my fingers, and they have gone from too-spindly to a mass of unidentifiable flesh somehow attached to my sleeve.  I think I notice Fassina, scowling at me as I scowl at the things that I suspect are meant to be my fingers.

The screams are getting louder and Pallegina's blows are becoming violent from stress.  I am thinking of the pathological studies I was doing at about her age, observing the reactions of isolated immune systems to assorted flora in the Lands.  I do not like that I am thinking of this.

(In a few months' time, in an island to the north, I will find myself in the corpse of another god, one dedicated to slaughter and grime; and I will raise my blade against something not quite dead; and I will feel the selfish hunger of something not quite alive; and even then I shan't feel so unclean as I do now.)

v.

There was a library in one of my favorite valleys, right in the center of town, where I used to go to try to unwind from weeks drawn on too long.  The Scriptorium reminds me of that library, gnawed over by vines that look a little too mobile, lost in a hostile territory where the days blend together and you can't see the sunrise.  Sure, there weren't _eyeballs_ on the vines, no nauseating sense of being watched by something you did not want to be seen by, but still there is something here.

Why am I burning memories in these braziers?  Fire is not selective, has no sense of moderation.  Fire needs to be managed and I am not the one in control here.  The dreams of a twice-dead god that absentmindedly solder body parts and souls together into one shrieking monstrosity are the only real authority of this place.

I need something, I think, and this is the way to do it.  Eyeballs mounted on the end of ugly pink tendons blink at me just a bit too keenly and I'm not sure I've forgotten anything at all.  Certainly no one else seems worried -- or, uh, more worried than usual; Aloth is frowning at the walls as Pallegina stubbornly binds a wound on his arm.

The head librarian smiles beatifically at us with all her teeth and no eyes and asks us what we think we can do to stop a god.  Somewhere in the memories one of them returned to me I see a filthy man at a crossroads, howling, waving a torch.  I can't remember what it means.

vi.

The book in my grasp is still shouting at me from beyond the veil of years when we see them, dribbling, the same sickly blue light glimmering.  _We are Llengrath_ , says the fungus says the book says the archmage.  Something in the walls is saying it, too.

I am thinking of the part of me Eothas couldn't've been fucked to keep from me -- the part of me that stopped being me at the edge of Eir Glanfath, the part of me that spent five years keeping me up at night as if I had not come to the Reach to rest.  I am thinking of the me that knew damn well we didn't belong together and I am holding this book and I am staring at this mushroom and thinking of the godlike waiting for us in the temple. I am thinking of what me and I would have become if we had taken another thirty years, another century to find each other again.  I am thinking of Mowrghek Îen so overgrown even the dragons carry it with them, and of these well-rotted bookcases swarming with things that used to guard them.  I am reading these lines about trees and grafts and wondering what the Hel happened to Llengrath that they turned into _this_.

The thing that is not quite an eye stares me down in the exact same way the wizard downstairs stares me down ( _down_ stares _, ahahaha_ , cackles part of me that Eothas inexplicably left untouched).  The thing in the Scriptorium that is and is not my Steward is lounging ominously in the back of my memories with a plaque at its feet, and a terror deep like Breith Eaman where remains the corpse of Woedica's champion grips me -- that I shall be like a headless statue, an abandoned cadaver below the waters, a disembodied jawbone hanging from the wall with a yellowish slab of metal under it declaring the date and means of my death and _nothing else because there is nothing these gods know or love better than death, not even the ones that have nothing to do with death, because they were built from death and even in it make a mockery of those of us who are still subject to the Wheel and_ \--

Pallegina does not so much put her hand on my shoulder as purposefully elbow me on the way to grab the hilt of her sword, and I calm my breathing, and I stare back at the eyeless mushroom that has triumphantly found life in this place of death.  I do not question the part of me that Eothas returned so recently, nor its silence as my trembling fingers close around a little glass vial at the bottom of my pack.

vii.

 _We haven’t kissed, have we_ , he asks, drawing patterns on the cover of his grimoire with the tip of a finger.  He is looking at me fixedly, the way he does when he is trying to wrestle down his nerves; the way he looked at me all those years ago on a bridge far away from here, a halo of flame behind his head.   _We haven't kissed, have we_ , and I open my sponge-dry mouth to assure him that we--

I see the shadow pass over his face to mirror the one undoubtedly on mine as I realize that I don't know any more than he does.  The head librarian with her smeared-clay face turns her eyeless smile in our direction.

viii.

 _Interloper_ , rumbles the dying slice of a god before us.  Fassina is shaking in rage behind me.  Aloth bears a fury that is entirely his own.  I am holding my knife close to my hip, in my off hand.  Marux Amanth, slayer of friends, spike through my inconstant soul, vibrates in my grasp.

 _Interloper_ , says a pile of eyeballs and gore that knows where I have been all this time, and I think of the harvest that scatters bits of the same plant over the fields to forget about themselves.  I see the smile of the head librarian in those eyes.

 _Interloper_ , for the last time; and it is not until we climb upward to catch the dawn of the eighth day and Edér gingerly hands me a handkerchief that I realize my cheeks are wet from something other than blood.


End file.
